The Full Self-Driving Online Shop — Is The World Ready for It?
Headless Fully AI-Automated Ecom Stores
While my generation and those older than me seem to have a very real need to “talk to a human” when it comes to big purchases and returns/exchanges, the younger generations will be growing up in a world where AI interaction will be default and normal and it seems like a good idea to get ahead of that curve and manifest early retirement for myself by building out fully automated stores…… shoe-horning them into the world until they actually work.
Some people laugh when they learn what I am building, saying it will never work and you cant replace hard work with pure automation, blah blah. Lots of AI hate going around, but it’s easy to understand why; hard workers resent how fast AI can execute things that they previously spent days, weeks, or even months building. It’s totally unfair.
But it’s also a superpower anyone can leverage as an individual, if we so desire.
While I wouldn’t want to discount my years spent in the trenches of customer support and enterprise marketing support — knowledge and experience has definitely been helpful in being able to know how to address issues with retail chatbots — the latest version of GPT (4o Turbo) renders all of my own experience a bit less relevant to the execution of a successful sales oriented conversational chatbot.
When I first started, I had to build the entire conversation flow in a chatbot. Now it’s all about how comprehensive your prompt is for the AI to follow your commands.
Weeks of building and training and programming and testing and revising have been reduced to:
Prompt: “Role : You are an award winning salesman for an industry leading sporting goods retailer. You create compelling informative product highlights while answering customer questions. Use NLP techniques that generate desire and connection in the customer”.
My chatbots are converting much better now, not only because incorrect responses have been audited and revised — but because the new version of GPT is that much better at imitating a natural convo and is much better at sales than I am.
Did I mention, I am not a salesman?
I run profitable websites, but my old career path was tech support and customer experience.
I am a very fortunate computer-nerdish kind of person who started one online business that took off without ads, without trying, without much effort, being a matter of “the right place, at the right time, with the right solution for a need” — and I had to learn the hard way that most online businesses….. just don’t work that way!
My years in customer experience related roles and tech support most definitely helped me build my first chatbots and create better interactions and support…. at first.
All online stores will need an owner / admin who knows about the product, and HOW to sell to their target audience. Cannagar Tools was that vehicle for me. Making cannabis cigars was a project that I was passionate and knowledgeable about, and a business was much easier to form around that.
That is usually not part of what you are buying with Turnkey ecom solutions.
“What about buying one of those Turnkey ecoms?”
I’ve come across many services offering a turnkey e-com store in the form of a prebuilt drop-shipping website, print-on-demand website, amazon store, etsy shop, etc.
The problem is always the way they pitch it to their customers, compared to the reality of truly manifesting a successful online store.
Yes, you can purchase a turnkey ecom store, but what they aren’t always telling you is that unless you have a product that quite literally sells itself like my “any size or shape you want” cigar molds did (because I was already immersed in my target audience )— you are going to have to claw and scratch and scour the web to find an audience and build it from total scratch.
They are selling you a website, ready to go, but you aren’t buying a turnkey customer base.
Building that is ON YOU.
If you are looking to purchase a turnkey ecom solution, always find out what the real service is.
If they are only selling you the functional website and after that, the relationship is primarily you as a customer, with them remaining as service tech support, then you need to find an advertising agency (or ad agent on Fiver) pronto or you might be stuck paying for your monthly costs, while having no customers and having to figure all that out by yourself.
Some turnkey ecom offerings are actually ad agencies that sell you the website and then offer to run your ads after the website is delivered.
The more honest ones are upfront about this. The less honest ones, it won’t exactly be transparent until you have taken possession of the store.
That happened to me in 2021.
Be aware of this — there may be a value ladder at the end of your ecom store build.
They might sell you the store, then immediately sell you their advertisement services which are baked into their promises of leading you to success. If they are good at what they do, this arrangement can be quite beneficial, but I would always prefer someone who is transparent and honest from the start.
You need to ask questions and find out what the end-game plan is when it comes to actually making your store profitable.
“Chris, Why Don’t You Sell AI Automated Stores, Turnkey?”
I can build someone a fully automated ecom store and advise on what type of products will generate fewer instances of customer support (and possible need for human interaction).
What I cannot promise is to know exactly how to message your target audience, or sell the particular product that you may want to sell, and I am definitely not trying to start an ad agency.
That has been the issue for the year with my idea of offering turnkey automated ecoms as a product.
I would rather just teach what I am doing on YouTube because I really love my life right now. If I sell turnkey ecoms, then I have to show up every day and support you guys because I’d be starting a whole new company around it.
I’m doing all of this for a very “Pee Wee Herman Breakfast Machine” kind of reason:
The glee of seeing it all work after I build it, and specifically, the joy to watch money appear in my Stripe account while I am doing other things, completely unrelated to my websites.
I have two online stores that profit without paying much attention to them, without having to jump through hoops to constantly keep them running, and if I can enable others to build similar stores for themselves, sweeeeeet.
The tools for making this a reality are finally here. (GPT, advanced targeting algorithms, no-code software builders, etc etc etc etc)
My headless store concept is working so far on small scale — mostly with print on demand products and my own 3D print niche — tweaking it and dialing it in for myself has been my project for the last year or so.
I have to reduced down to the product ideas that can actually accomplish what I desire — a store with as little human intervention as possible.
An online store that looks like an entire company might be behind it, but it is actually just one guy who operates it, and he is hiking on a mountain having left his laptop at home because his store runs without him.
I am him.
That dude is me.
If you read the About page, you’d know that.
(People always message my website Cannagar Tools speaking as if they are talking to a company staffed with people, but it’s just me and always has been)
Chris, Can I Take Your Ideas and Build a Turnkey Ecom Solution?
Let me make this completely clear : I totally want you to take my ideas, turn them into something amazing of your own if you want to, and then just message me saying “thanks for the inspiration!”.
I sell my print on demand generator workflows to help people get started, but that is about all I want to offer.
I am streamlining and refining these stores to support a lifestyle goal.
There is no intention of showing up every day and putting 40+ hours per week into turning them into big companies. But… there is nothing that says you can’t. It’s totally an option.
For a little while — my stores will remain less profitable than a store that builds a team and really puts 100% of themselves into and engages the project all day.
This is a fact.
I wanted a store that would design products on it’s own, publish them, publish to social media, engage social media, create ads, test them, and scale itself, while it’s owner goes into the mountains and ignores the living fuck out of that store.
Can that be a reality?
I’m certain that it can be.
It’s pretty much already here, all that is left is automatons being so normalized that most people aren’t phased when interacting and purchasing from one with little or no expectation of human hand-offs.
This is totally possible with some items today, but might take a few years before more expensive things can be sold this way. (This is why I don’t do “high ticket” affiliate marketing).
If I start selling these store builds as a service, then I’ll have to show up and support you because I wouldn’t want to offer a crappy service. Then I’m working 40 hours per week again.
I’d rather just make videos, use the content as yet another leg of income, and not be tethered to the need to be available during support hours or work myself to death so that OTHERS can accomplish what I have set out to accomplish.
If you want to follow my lead, awesome sauce.
Let’s see where I am.
Product design and publishing, accomplished thanks to Make Integrations, Open AI, Ideogram, and Printify
Customer Support, Pre Sales, and Returns/Exchanges handled by a Chatbot, accomplished thanks to Orimon AI and ChatGPT.
Social Media marketing automated by Make Integrations.
Target audience optimization for YouTube by Taja AI
(Video in progress)
The last piece is automated ads.
Ads are already automated in targeting and execution, its the creation phase that still takes quite a bit of effort.
I’ve been working with Google to learn about their ad process and how to tweak it. I’ve been searching for the right AI solutions to both create ads automatically, and deploy and test them.
There are solutions that can automate video content, such as Kapwing, and they are only getting better each month.
I don’t want to sit in front of the ad dashboard creating the ad, testing it, responding to it.
Ideally, any video content is made automatically from new products published and watched by a Make trigger, then automatically generate an ad, create all the copy, publish the ad, and run ab/tests, without any input from me.
No one is offering that much of a comprehensive solution yet. Might have to piece it together.
But that’s ok.
Only 3 years ago, no one was using an AI chatbot to run their business either.
The future is looking bright.
Thank you for reading!
Until next time….
Onward and Upward Everybody!
-Chris
A.I. Lifestyle
Lifestyle Income and Automation Solutions. "There is always a solution for everything!"
#ecom #automation #endtoendautomation #retail #chatbot #printondemand #selfdriving